Birthplace

Education

Other jobs

According to seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey, "he had been in his younger yeares as Schoolmaster in the Countrey". He was also an actor (one critic called him "an upstart Crow").

Did you know?

Mention in 1598 of the lost play, Love's Labour's Won, leaves yet another Shakespeare mystery.

Critical verdict

Ben Jonson's verdict in the First Folio - that Shakespeare is "for all time" - has proved true (although his texts were often bowdlerised for sensitive ages, to the extent of giving King Lear a happy ending). Great editors and critics include Pope, Dr Johnson, J Dover Wilson and Harold Bloom.

Recommended works

What can we say? (Apart from don't forget the sonnets.)

Influences

Marlowe was a strong influence on Shakespeare's early histories.

Now read on

Three plays - Henry VIII, Cardenio and The Two Noble Kinsmen - were perhaps written in collaboration with Fletcher. Of the great number of works inspired by Shakespeare, Anthony Burgess's Nothing Like The Sun, about his "dark lady", is a wonderful Elizabethan pastiche; No Bed For Bacon by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon (to which Shakespeare in Love bears more than a passing relationship) is wittily disrespectful; and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is an object lesson in the reclamation of minor characters.

Adaptations

There are nearly 400 films based on Shakespeare's plays: highlights include Laurence Olivier's declamatory passion, Baz Lurhmann's pin-up Romeo+Juliet, Roman Polanski's extraordinarily bloody Macbeth... Post-Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You, you will be delighted to hear that O, a version of Othello set in an American high school, is on its way to our screens.

Recommended biography

Try William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life by S Schoenbaum (1975).

Criticism

The New Cambridge editions of the plays contain a wealth of scholarly and linguistic notes whilst retaining readability; Ted Hughes's Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being is wacky but inspired.